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This week an Indian social activist arrived in Europe to begin battle
against a most unlikely Goliath – the international green movement. Anil
Patel and a handful of others have fought for more than a decade to win
a fair deal for the 18 000 tribal people in Gujarat who are now moving out
of their homes to make way for the reservoir of a dam on the Narmada river,
the Sardar Sarovar Projects (SSP).

The result of their relentless battling with the Gujarat state government
is a resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) policy that any nation would
be proud of. But Patel claims that misinformation from environmental activists
opposing the dam, both at home and abroad, is jeopardising chances for similarly
fair policies in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, the other two states affected
by the projects.

‘Environmentalists should respect the power they have. Misusing data
gives them a bad name and they lose a golden opportunity to positively influence
their governments.’ But, he says, they have been biased over the Narmada.
‘I hope my visit here and in the US will set the record straight.’

Gujarat calls the SSP its ‘lifeline’. The dam and canal projects are
to provide irrigation and drinking water to drought-stricken areas of Gujarat,
particularly the districts of Saurashtra and Kutch. After completion in
1994, the scheme is expected to irrigate 1 875 000 hectares and generate
up to 1450 megawatts of electricity. But for many environmental activists,
the Narmada projects embody all that is wrong with the Indian government’s
model of development.

First, the scheme is big. And big is automatically suspect. Moreover,
SSP is only the first of 30 large dam projects planned for the development
of the valley. Secondly, it is partly funded by foreigners, and worse still
by the World Bank, whose record on ecological sensitivity is widely held
to be less than adequate.

Thirdly, the projects will destroy thou-sands of hectares of forest
and oust thousands of people – mostly tribal – from their lands. Finally,
neither the people whose land will be flooded nor those who will supposedly
benefit from it were ever consulted. Instead, the projects were designed
and approved in the offices of the Gujarat and national governments and
the state company Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL), which is building
the dam.

Feelings are running high. A march to the dam site called by the Save
the Narmada movement, a coalition of anti-dam campaigners, was prevented
from entering Gujarat in January by police and counter-demonstrators who
support the project. Just three weeks ago, members of the Save the Narmada
movement and people of Manibeli village in Maharashtra threatened to drown
themselves rather than quit the village (This Week, 14 September).

The activists’ mistrust of the government goes back to the late 1970s,
when work first started on the dam. Gujarat then had no R&R plan and
was dragging its feet about drawing one up. Villagers were intimidated,
browbeaten and inadequately compensated. Patel remembers one politician
whose view summed up the government’s attitude in 1978: ‘We don’t have to
move a finger. When the water rises, these people will be flushed out like
rats from their holes.’

At this time Patel’s non-governmental organisation (NGO), known as ARCH,
was the only one working on R&R policy. Other NGOs followed suit from
1985. But when, in 1987, Gujarat announced a much improved R&R policy,
these other NGOs came out solidly against the dam. The anti-dam NGOs began
to attack the economic and scientific rationale of the projects as well
as their relevance to the poor. But Patel claims the arguments are often
confused and sometimes based on incorrect or irrelevant data.

For example, according to Himanshu Thakkar, one of the prominent campaigners
of the movement, ‘Of the total cultivable land in Gujarat, Kutch, Saurashtra
and north Gujarat are most in need of water. But 98.4 per cent of cultivable
land in Kutch, 90.4 per cent of cultivable land in Saurashtra and 78 per
cent of cultivable land in north Gujarat will not get SSP water.’

Thakkar emphasises that the data originate in the government’s own publications.
But the percentages miss the point entirely because the canal network is
intended to cover only a ‘command area’ of 180 000 hectares, not the entire
state. According to the Gujarat government, 70 per cent of the command area
is drought prone. This is a more relevant figure, says Patel.

He also says that anti-dam campaigners use incorrect figures to prove
that the dam’s designers overestimated the flow in the Narmada River. Then
comes the argument, using official estimates, that the canal network will
lose 40 per cent of the water it carries through evaporation and leakage.
But this is much less than for most irrigation schemes. SSNNL says that
even the small channels which will serve 8-hectare plots will be lined to
prevent leakage.

Thakkar stresses that these tail ends of the canals will be the first
to suffer during water shortages. For example, Narmada Sagar will be the
second of the large Narmada dams to be built. If it is not completed, the
tail ends will be starved of water, Thakkar says. He also argues that the
tail ends may never be completed if the government fails to find enough
money. Patel is not convinced by these arguments. The SSP’s efficiency increases
if Narmada Sagar is built, but the viability of the canal network is independent
of the extra water that it would provide. The SSP are already more than
one-third complete and work is unlikely to stop, Patel says. Every political
party in Gujarat is committed to completing SSP, with or without foreign
money.

The Save the Narmada movement has other reasons for opposing the dam.
Perhaps the strongest is its belief that wealthy farmers, rather than the
poor, will benefit most from the project. The Gujarat government says it
will not allow any cash crops such as sugar cane, bananas or rice to be
grown in the command area. But Thakkar points out that five of the largest
sugar processing factories in Asia are now being built in the SSP command
area. The counterclaim is that water will be released through gates in the
canals, operated by remote control from the control centre. Each unit of
land is allotted the same volume of water regardless of what the farmer
chooses to cultivate.

But this view is no match for what Patel calls the ‘historical’ argument
that irrigation projects have almost always failed to live up to their promises.
The anti-dam campaigners ask why the SSP should be different.

Patel’s answer is to put pressure on SSNNL to ensure that needy farmers
do get their fair share of water. ‘Left to their own devices the dam builders
would do nothing for the people. It’s up to the NGOs to ensure that they
keep their promises and that the poor really do get the benefits of SSP,’
he says. So far it has been possible to make SSNNL keep its promises. Gujarat’s
R&R policy is the best example.

Today, all heads of households in Gujarat who are to be displaced by
the SSP, are entitled to 2 hectares of land of their choice, as are their
sons. The government bears the costs of moving and subsistence until the
first harvest. Landless labourers forced to move out of the zone to be submerged
and people squatting on government land are offered the same compensation.
The same policy holds for people in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh who are
affected by the SSP and wish to move to Gujarat.

Both Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh are less generous. Maharashtra
does not recognise the rights of sons over 18 to compensation. Madhya Pradesh
offers nothing to landless labourers who lose their livelihoods when their
employers are resettled.

Gujarat’s R&R policy took more than a decade to forge. The state
government had to be prodded and cajoled by Gujarati NGOs like Patel’s,
by Oxfam, the World Bank and Survival International. The central government
is so impressed that it is using the Gujarat policy as a model for national
guidelines on R&R – a significant move, since Indian NGOs estimate that
development projects in India displace 2 million people every year.

Patel is confident that Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh could be persuaded
to improve their policies if the NGOs in those two states worked for R&R
rather than to stop the dam. The Save the Narmada movement, however, insists
that the policy is good only on paper and that it is shoddily implemented.

Under the policy, villagers are provided with temporary houses built
close to their new land. Before their old land is submerged they will be
helped to dismantle their old houses and move them to the new land.

The influential journalist Kersi Sabavala has followed SSP and its implementation.
He has written about the village of Malu, where people were given the wrong
title deeds to the new land and others were given less than their due, stony
land or land prone to waterlogging. There is no electricity and only one
well in the village. Since May, when more displaced newcomers arrived, everyone
has had to join long queues for their water.

The Malu villagers live in small, temporary, terraced sheds made of
corrugated metal sheet with their animals quartered in an open porch formed
by the overhang of the metal roofs. When it rains the floors of the sheds
turn to mud. People in Malu ‘shuttle back and forth between their old lands
and new. Many said they would go back because they are fed up of living
in tin sheds,’ Sabavala said.

Vinod Babbar, SSNNL’s new executive director in charge of R&R, admits
that Malu is an embarrassment but says SSNNL is moving as fast as it can
to solve the problems. But Babbar points out important omissions in Sabavala’s
account of Malu.

First, the families constantly move between Malu and their old lands
because they are continuing to farm their old land, together with the new,
as is their right until it is submerged. Secondly, the villagers chose metal
sheet over other combinations of wood, bamboo and metal because the sheet
has a high resale value. It has replaced thatch as the roofing material
of choice, and the Malu villagers intend to use it on their old houses once
they have moved them to Malu.

Malu was the first village to be resettled and many things went wrong.
Babbar contrasts Malu with Pansoli village, a few kilometres away, where
people were resettled in June. There, the temporary sheds are still made
of metal sheet but they are more spacious, constructed in pairs rather than
in terraces and are built on raised plinths to avoid flooding. Unlike the
Malu sheds, the temporary houses at Pansoli were built in consultation with
the people who would live in them.

Each villager has the correct deeds for the correct amount of land and
there is ample drinking water. The only complaint is that the buses do not
stop near enough to the new site. ‘We’ve made mistakes but we have learned
from them. We’re on the right track now,’ Babbar says.

According to Babbar, Pansoli is not the only success story. So far,
3000 of the 4500 families affected by the SSP in Gujarat have been allotted
land. By 31 May, 274 Maharashtran families and 282 families from Madhya
Pradesh had also been allotted land in Gujarat.

One potentially serious problem is so-called secondary displacement,
where people being resettled displace those already living on the land.
Sabavala says there is secondary displacement in Malu but Sudarshan Iyengar,
who works with Patel, disagrees.

Iyengar interviewed members of 98 families of chakars, labourers hired
on annual contract. Thirty of them had ceased to be chakars years before
the land was sold. Iyengar found only one of the rest who had stopped work
because the landlord had sold out to newcomers. Iyengar says this may be
because some landless people are beginning to take up jobs in schemes –
such as a dairy project – now available in Malu. Others are finding work
in new factories starting up nearby. Finally, there is work on the newcomers’
lands, but that may stop once the displaced families move permanently to
the new site.

The dispute will probably never be settled. Patel’s group is pragmatic:
the dam is coming, Gujarat has no alternative way to provide water to drought-prone
areas and, without help, those displaced would suffer most. For the anti-dam
campaigners the Narmada projects have become a cause celebre of an Indian
movement against what is seen as ‘mal-development’. Yet both sides see themselves
as working for development that is ecologically responsible, socially just
and designed in cooperation with those on the bottom rung.